media Quotes

“What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

“With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”

“The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.”

“Commercials ... provide a slogan ... that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.”

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

“There is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.”

“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

“Technology is ideology.”

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”

“Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face.”

“You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns.”

“It’s weird how obsessed the media is with calling everyone racist, isn’t it? It’s almost like they want everyone to be racist or something, for some reason.”

“Instead of asking themselves why they lost people’s trust, the media instead asked why the people had lost trust in them. A subtle, but important difference.”

“If I could tell my colleagues in the media four things, they would be: 1.Everyone hates you. 2.No one is afraid of you. 3.No one believes what you say. 4.Nobody owes you anything. If every journalist in America realized those four things, their behavior would transform overnight, immeasurably for the better.”

“The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don’t yield immediate solutions.”

“There were now over a hundred million cameras functional and accessible around the world, making in-person reporting unnecessarily expensive and dangerous, to say nothing of the carbon expenditures.”

“The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in beauty—beauty that made Jubal’s heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, ‘Look at me. I am a son of man.‘”

“The media is the right arm of anarchy.”

“We got there and it had been torn down. They had built a pretty nice stucco mall there, so Loga and Quendy said we should go in and buy some cool stuff to go out in. That seemed good to us. I wanted to buy some things but I didn’t know what they were... Quendy bought some shoes, but the minute she walked out of the store she didn’t like them anymore. Marty couldn’t think of anything he wanted, so he ordered this really null shirt. He said it was so null it was like ordering nothing.”